The knowledge economy is fundamentally affecting the modern work environment. As demand for knowledge workers increases, new work paradigms are being developed in which specialized teams are assembled for specific projects. Those specialized teams may need to work together for a matter of days, weeks or months to accomplish a given project. With more regularity, the team is disbanded after the project is completed and team members move on to other projects, often working with a partly or completely different group of people. In addition, people who need to work together are increasingly geographically dispersed due to corporate partnering, acquisitions, globalization, and related factors. While there is motivation for people to work together more closely and more effectively due to competitive pressures, the increasing geographical dispersion of talent in the workforce creates a dilemma which is not easily resolved.
It is generally accepted that people work together best when they are physically collocated. Physical collocation facilitates communications, and therefore collaboration, that is responsive, efficient and spontaneous. Physical collocation in today's business world is not, however, generally practical even when workers are employed by the same company. The stresses associated with travel and commuting often prevent or impair the efficiency of bringing co-workers into physical collocation in order to facilitate job function.
Modern telecommunications services facilitate collaboration among co-workers. Services such as the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), the Internet, and related services such as facsimile, electronic mail, instant messaging, one-way and two-way paging services all contribute to enable and facilitate collaboration. As currently available, however, such services are not optimized to facilitate collaboration between team members.
For example, even though modern facilities, such as described in co-applicants' U.S. Pat. No. 6,097,804 which issued Aug. 1, 2000 and is entitled METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR COMPLETING A VOICE CONNECTION BETWEEN FIRST AND SECOND VOICE TERMINALS IN A SWITCHED TELEPHONE NETWORK, facilitate call setup and control by permitting calls to be initiated from a worldwide web interface or the like, problems are still inherent. It is still impossible to determine the availability of a called party before a call is placed. Even when a call attempt is unsuccessful, the caller is generally not provided with any feedback to indicate why the call attempt failed. For example, the called party may be on another call, or may be away from their desk or office. It is estimated that at least as many as 84% (6 out of 7) of business calls fail to connect directly to the called party.
Electronic mail provides a convenient and inexpensive mode of communication. Electronic mail tends, however, to be a relatively slow method of communication. Recently, instant messaging has become increasingly accepted and services such as Yahoo® Messenger are experiencing explosive growth with millions of subscribers. Instant messaging services provide a means of exchanging messages between two or more participants in a messaging session in near real time. With Yahoo® Messenger a user can define a group of “friends” by selecting other registered users who accept being listed among the user's group of friends. After the group of friends is established, the user who established the group receives dynamic status information respecting the presence of the group of friends at their computer workstation. Consequently, the instant messaging user has a prior knowledge of whether other members in the group of friends are logged on to the Yahoo® Messenger and, if so, whether they have used their workstation within the past few minutes.
Yahoo® Messenger also permits Net2Phone® conversations to be initiated between a user and another party using a graphical user interface that provides a dial pad and an address book to initiate calls that are set up as a first leg through the Internet and a second leg through the PSTN, in accordance with a service provided by Net2Phone®. However, no availability information is provided respecting the called party or the disposition of their telephone. Therefore, it is impossible for a Yahoo® Messenger subscriber to know the status of a “friend's” telephone before a call is placed. Furthermore, each user of the Yahoo® Messenger service must define their own group of friends. There is no central facility for defining a group or a team, and there is no method of controlling congruence between two groups defined by individual users. Consequently, although Yahoo® Messenger facilitates message exchange, it is not adapted to provide a cohesive collaboration environment for geographically-dispersed teams working at a professional level.
Other applications also exist to facilitate collaboration among geographically-dispersed parties. For example, Microsoft Corporation provides NetMeeting® which is adapted to enable collaboration between two or more people using text chat, streaming video, and/or voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) conversation. NetMeeting® also supports document and application sharing, as well as an exchange of cursor control. While NetMeeting® is a powerful collaboration tool, it only functions well in two-way communications sessions, and fails to provide functionality for defining or tracking of a team. Furthermore, knowledge of respective Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of each participant is required in order to establish a direct inter-party session. Two-party and multi-partly sessions can be established using a Microsoft NetMeeting® server without knowledge of respective IP addresses, however, session efficiency and performance are compromised.
As a further example, Teamcast.com provides a collaboration tool that permits the definition of a team and enables project and event tracking. The Teamcast.com tool also enables communications by electronic mail and instant messaging. The collaborative tool fails, however, to instantiate a virtual team environment that provides knowledge of the availability of other team members to facilitate communications attempts. It also fails to facilitate voice or multimedia communications among team members.
There therefore exists a need for a tool that facilitates collaboration among geographically-dispersed members of a team by creating a virtual team environment that provides dynamic preference and presence information to permit communications sessions among team members to be transparently established.